Special Features

The Greatest PC Games of All Time: The '80s

Gerald: Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me! Sid Meier's Pirates! was a groundbreaking simulation of life as a privateer on the Spanish Main. While most other games focused on directed, linear gameplay, Pirates! presented an open-ended experience, paving the way for today's popular sandbox and open-world games.

Over the course of a single game you'd engage in all sorts of activities, like blasting away pesky pirates on the open seas, conquering rival cities for your homeland, courting a wife, searching for buried treasure, finding long-lost relatives, or even setting up a trade empire by exploiting local economies. By accumulating wealth and gaining notoriety, you could set yourself up for a cushy retirement as a king's advisor, while an unsuccessful career would doom you to the unpleasant life of an elderly beggar.

You could choose from six different historical time periods, and each game was randomized so that you'd never experience the same game twice. Diplomatic relations between the game's four nations were unpredictable. Dumb luck was often as responsible for your success as strategy and skill, but that's just art imitating life.

Pirates! was a game that could keep you glued to the keyboard for hours. The passage of real time brought dynamic changes to the power structures of the Caribbean, and with those changes came new challenges. Sure, things got harder as your character aged, but the desire to sack one last town or find that last treasure cache was incentive enough to keep your sea legs fresh till a ripe old age.